1. How long will the speakers stay in Florida?
| A．For two days. | B．For three days. | C．For five days. |
| A．Good friends. | B．A couple. | C．Parent and kid. |
Miami is one of the most international and attractive cities in the US.
South Beach
The most famous section of Miami is South Beach (also known as SoBe). It’s in the heart of the “Art Deco District”. The neighborhood is colorful and has some truly unique architecture (建筑). South Beach is popular for its shopping and fashionable restaurants, but it’s definitely the section of town where people come to have fun.
Eating
Miami has just about any type of food you could imagine.
Stormy Weather
The only bad things about Miami are the tropical（热带的）storms that often hit the area. Miami has always been a hurricane hotbed because of its location on the southern tip of Florida.
| A．The hurricane season runs from June to November. |
| B．One of the worst hurricanes to hit Miami was Hurricane Andrew. |
| C．In late August of 1992 Andrew hit Florida with winds of over 200 mph. |
| D．After dinner, the place turns into a bar and the music plays on until 4 am. |
| E．It’s at the southern tip of Florida, which is known as the “Sunshine State”. |
| F．Latin food is extremely popular and has also influenced many other cooking styles. |
| G．With some of the modern nightclubs in the world, Miami draws DJs from all over the world. |
3 . Prairie dogs（草原犬鼠）are native to the prairies of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. They are actually a type of squirrel named for the place where they live and the warning call they give when they are threatened（威胁）, which sounds similar to a dog’s bark. One of the amazing things about prairie dogs is the way that they live in “towns.” These towns can contain many hundreds of prairie dog families.
Prairie dogs like to live with other prairie dogs, so they join together to make prairie dog towns. These are collections of prairie dog families that can cover one or two square kilometers. Prairie dog towns are big because each family lives in their own tunnel（地道）system, which is usually 10-30 meters wide. Families are usually made up of 1 male, 2 to 4 females, and their children. When the young prairie dogs reach three years of age, they leave home to found their own families on the edges（边缘）of the town.
Prairie dog tunnels usually have several chambers. These chambers are like rooms in a house. Female prairie dogs use them when they give birth and when they raise their babies. The other chambers are used by the family for sleeping. To make them comfortable, prairie dogs separate the chambers by lining the walls with grass. The tunnels are also used for protection when prairie dogs are threatened by other animals. For this reason they are designed with two or more holes serving as doors.
Prairie dogs like living in towns and they even make social visits to each other. When two friendly prairie dogs meet, they greet each other with a kind of kiss. However, the male prairie dogs defend the borders of the family’s tunnel system against enemies. Prairie dog towns have conflicts, social gatherings, and cooperation just like a human town, which makes them very interesting.
1. What do we know about prairie dogs?| A．They are group animals. | B．They bark like squirrels. |
| C．They are an endangered species. | D．They are wild dogs living on grasslands. |
| A．By giving the meaning of chambers. | B．By describing how chambers are built. |
| C．By classifying the contents of chambers. | D．By comparing chambers to human homes. |
| A．To let in fresh air. | B．To make it comfortable for sleep. |
| C．To run away from dangerous enemies. | D．To avoid being crowded in and out. |
| A．social life | B．social structure | C．hunting habits | D．living environment |
4 . You go to the coffee shop and take your coffee to go. You enjoy your drink, and then throw the paper cup in the garbage. Or do you put it in the recycling? I's confusing. A lot of us—people everywhere—are using to-go cups these days. A recent report said that there are 600 billion cups-billion with a ‘b’- that are produced and sold globally on an annual basis So that`s a lot, " say Christy Slay with The Sustainability Consortium. Starbucks alone says it contributes 1 percent of those disposable cups: That's an estimated 6 billion cups a year.
To help reduce those numbers. Starbucks and McDonald's are launching a three-year project to build a better cup: one that's both fully recyclable and compostable. Here's the big problem with the paper one you get there and in other coffee shops. “They look like paper, but they actually have a thin layer of plastic on the inside,” Slay says. That plastic coating keeps the cups from leaking. The problem is that it also makes the cups really hard to recycle, and only a few facilities in the world can do it.
A few companies have already rolled out compostable coffee cups. But Dylan de Thomas with The Recycling Partnership says there is a problem with those cups, too. "Typically they're compostable in industrial settings, so not your backyard compost that you and I might have, but at fairly technically advanced composting facilities." There aren't a lot of those facilities around, either.
So why exactly, in the 21st century, is it so hard to produce a better paper cup? "It's not necessarily very technically hard, though there are technical problems to overcome to make something recyclable and compostable, says Bridget Croke with Closed Loop Partners, a firm working to build what they call a circular economy. It's a fancy way of talking about turning waste into value. Almost anything is technically recyclable, Croke says. "But recycling is a business, and if materials can't move through the recycling system and be turned into a product that has value, they're not functionally recyclable.”
1. What are people puzzled at about the paper cup?| A．How to deal with the used one. | B．Why people reject it carelessly. |
| C．What makes it hard to compost. | D．Why Starbucks uses so many cups. |
| A．It helps make the cup more portable | B．It makes the cup easily recyclable. |
| C．It prevents the water from escaping | D．It promotes the extended use of the cup. |
| A．Its future is promising | B．It is not a profitable business. |
| C．technical problems are unsolvable | D．A more recyclable cup will be put into the market. |
| A．How can we design a better paper cup? |
| B．Why is it so hard to recycle paper cups? |
| C．What can we do to lessen the need of paper cups? |
| D．What damage do paper cups cause to our environment! |
| A．Really dry. | B．Really wet. | C．Really cold. |
6 . Greenland is the biggest island in the world. And the ice sheet that sits atop it is massive. “The pile of ice being so thick, it extends more than 10, 000 feet above the ocean. And if all that ice were to melt and go into the ocean, global sea levels would rise by 24 feet everywhere around the world,” said Jason Briner, a geologist at the University at Buffalo. The ice sheet is melting, of course. But just how much, compared to the past?
Briner’s team did a computer simulation（模拟)of the southwest of the Greenland ice sheet, which he says is a good proxy for ice melt across the entire ice sheet. The researchers plugged past climate data into that model to “hindcast”, rather than forecast, the past activity of the ice sheet. They then checked the model’s predictions of the past shape and size of the ice sheet by looking at piles of rocks and dirt on Greenland today, which outline the edges of ancient ice. And the simulation was in good agreement with the actual situation.
Using that reconstruction of the ice sheet over time, the team could compare the ice sheet’s historic losses to those happening today under human-caused global warming. And they determined that Greenland is on track to lose more ice this century than during any century in the past 12, 000 years — possibly four times as much. The results appear in the journal Nature.
Ultimately it’s up to us how much ice actually melts. “Humanity has the button — the carbon button — and that button is going to influence the rates of ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet.” If the world goes net carbon zero by 2100, for example, Briner says ice loss could stop, entirely at the end of the century, according to one model. “That was what kept me from being completely depressed about our study. ” Dozens of countries have already announced goals to go net carbon zero by the middle of this century — so far the U. S. is not one of them.
1. What does the underlined word “proxy” in Paragraph 2 refer to?| A．Combination. | B．Example. |
| C．Recommendation. | D．Interpretation. |
| A．It is conducted by predicting the activity of the ice sheet. |
| B．It centers on ice melt throughout the entire ice sheet. |
| C．It shows the ice sheet’s losses are in decline. |
| D．It consists with the ice sheet’s actual circumstance. |
| A．Greenland Is Melting Faster |
| B．Global Sea Levels Are Rising |
| C．America Causes the Ice Sheet to Melt |
| D．Man Can Conquer Nature |
7 . From this issue, we explore why the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute hasn't turned up anything since its founding in the 1980s. (See page 30 for more.) We asked our Facebook followers: Do you think that astronomers will find evidence of alien life in your lifetime?
Loran McCormick: 1 think they already have it. Judging by the sudden industrialization, I figure they found something that's probably been here since before humans walked the Earth.
Jens Avery: We may find life, but it may not want anything to do with us. We are not very advanced and can't even get along with each other.
Steven Buhrow: I think the more important question is — will any government ever publicly admit it in our lifetime? I fully believe that we could discover alien life today and the government would simply say the public is not ready for this information.
Jenna Walsh: I think we already see it, but just don't realize what it is. Intelligent alien life probably doesn't want anything to do with the disaster that is Earth at this point, so no doubt they're playing it safe and observing from a safe distance.
Christopher Harvey: By alien life, do you mean intelligent alien life? Then no. It would be extremely hard to find, short of them coming down to Earth. But if you mean unintelligent alien life, like bacteria or single cell, we might.
1. Why did we ask the Facebook followers the question?| A．To question the efficiency of SETI. |
| B．To confirm the appearance of aliens on earth. |
| C．To ensure the existence of aliens. |
| D．To complain about the failure to find aliens. |
| A．Loran McCormick. | B．Steven Buhrow. |
| C．Jenna Walsh. | D．Christopher Harvey. |
| A．An album. | B．A science fiction. |
| C．A magazine. | D．A travel guide. |
8 . Members of a native community in the arctic (北极的)areas of Sweden say their reindeer (驯鹿)are facing possible hunger from unusual weather related to climate change. The local Sami community takes care of about 8,000 reindeer throughout the year. The animals are moved between traditional feeding areas in high mountains close to Norway in the summer and forests farther east in the winter.
A community member, Inga, is worried about his reindeer. He said climate change has affected the area's weather activity and created food shortages. "If we don't find better areas for them where they can feed themselves and find food, the reindeer will die from hunger,” Inga said. He verified the problem by reaching down into the snow and pulling up a hard piece of ice close to the soil.
The area received unusual snowfall early in the fall, followed by rain that froze. Inga said this traps the plants that reindeer eat under a thick cover of ice. Some of the hungry reindeer have now moved away from their traditional feeding areas in search of food.
Community members say half the reindeer moved towards the east as planned. But the rest headed back to the mountains, where they face the risk of attacks by other animals or being caught in an avalanche (雪崩). Older members of the Sami community say that in the past, they only remember bad winters about once every ten years. But now, Inga says “extreme and strange weather are appearing more and more often,“ happening several times a year.
Snowfall is common for the area. But as temperatures increase, rain can also fall, creating a “rain-on-snow” effect. When this happens, food remains trapped under the ice where the reindeer cannot reach it. This causes the animals to grow weaker and struggle to make it through the winter. Weather changes have hit the Sami community hard.
“We don't want money because we can’t buy better weather with money. We need the EU to take action and they need to do it now,“ said Inga.
1. What problem do reindeer meet with at present?| A．Cold weather. | B．Risk of hunger. |
| C．Long march for food. | D．Polluted environment. |
| A．Proved. | B．Solved. | C．Ignored. | D．Answered. |
| A．Traps under the snow. | B．Hunt from human beings. |
| C．Rocks falling down the mountain. | D．Threat from other animals. |
| A．Flood. | B．Drought. |
| C．Rain-on-snow effect. | D．Snowfall. |
9 . The western green mamba(绿曼巴蛇), a kind of snake, is between 5.9 feet and 10.5 feet long. This makes the western green mamba the second longest poisonous snake in Africa, with the black mamba being the first.
The western green mamba is, however, the most agile(敏捷的) snake in the mamba family. Their skin color is greenish yellow or live green, which helps them to hide in the environment. One other important feature of the snake is its long tail with a sharp point.
The western green mamba can be found in West Africa. They often live in rain forests. Being an arboreal species, these snakes spend most of their time moving among the tree tops. They are also used to moving on the ground and will commonly leave their trees to run after a potential meal on the ground. The western green mamba is mostly active in the daytime, but can also be seen hunting at night from time to time.
The diet of a western green mamba is made up of birds and all kinds of small animals such as squirrels, mice and even bats. These snakes can get close to their target with the help of their natural skin color. When they are close enough, they bite the target with poisonous teeth quickly. Once the target has died, the western green mamba will swallow it whole. If these snakes are faced with danger, they will try to run away. If they have no way to run away, however, they will become very aggressive and attack their enemies with their sharp teeth repeatedly.
The female western green mamba is the one who lay eggs. They will lay from 5 to 15 eggs. The young snakes are completely independent after birth. The mother and father play no part in raising the baby snakes. The babies are born with everything they need to survive in the wilderness. If they can reach adulthood, then they will have almost no natural predators.
The western green mamba is not dying out. But its biggest threat comes from people and the damage they can bring to their homes. Hopefully, the western green mamba can continue to live alongside people and never have to worry that they will die out.
1. What do we know about the western green mamba ?| A．They are less poisonous than the black mamba. |
| B．Their skin colors help them hide from others. |
| C．They are usually seen looking for food at night |
| D．They are the longest poisonous snake in Africa . |
| A．living in hotels | B．living in the water |
| C．living in the grass | D．living in trees |
| A．hide itself into the environment nearby | B．fight against the enemy bravely |
| C．change its natural skin color | D．swallow the enemy whole |
| A．They can take care of each other. |
| B．They have no natural predators. |
| C．They don’t need their parents’ care after birth. |
| D．They lay from five to fifteen eggs at a time. |
10 . In 1982, when just 22 California condors(秃鹫) were left in the world, scientists caught the remaining population to breed the birds.
Chris Parish, director of conservation at the Peregrine Fund, a partner in the official rescue program, said, “We have put lot of efforts into this --- lot of dollars and a lot of years of research behind the present success.
Researchers began studying the birds in the 1940s. By the 1980s, experts began the slow process of catching, breeding and reintroducing the birds back into the wild. The population has since grown to more than 500.
It was the research that made the California government order that hunters shouldn’t use lead ammunition when shooting any wildlife anywhere in the state.
| A．The population was small. |
| B．But the birds remain in danger of dying out. |
| C．Parish pointed to a pilot program in Northern Arizona. |
| D．Our final goal is a population that is able to continue by itself. |
| E．They are now found mainly in California, Arizona and southern Utah. |
| F．The fight for the California condor is bigger than just the one species. |
| G．Nearly forty years later, 1000 California condor chicks had been born. |
